Notes
This section enumerates the changes that have been made to Scheme since
the ``Revised4 report'' [6] was published.
- The report is now a superset of the IEEE standard for Scheme
[13]: implementations that conform to the report will
also conform to the standard. This required the following changes:
- The empty list is now required to count as true.
- The classification of features as essential or inessential has been
removed. There are now three classes of built-in procedures: primitive,
library, and optional. The optional procedures are load,
with-input-from-file, with-output-to-file,
transcript-on, transcript-off, and
interaction-environment,
and - and / with more than two arguments.
None of these are in the IEEE standard.
- Programs are allowed to redefine built-in procedures. Doing so
will not change the behavior of other built-in procedures.
- Port has been added to the list of disjoint types.
- The macro appendix has been removed. High-level macros are now part
of the main body of the report. The rewrite rules for derived expressions
have been replaced with macro definitions. There are no reserved identifiers.
- Syntax-rules now allows vector patterns.
- Multiple-value returns, eval, and dynamic-wind have
been added.
- The calls that are required to be implemented in a properly tail-recursive
fashion are defined explicitly.
- `@' can be used within identifiers. `
|' is reserved
for possible future extensions.